My laptop is slowly coming towards the end of its life (getting really laggy, and slowly overheating) so im starting to consider what i should do? (have had it for 5 years hah so its treated me really well)

I am now a standard user. will use the odd Photoshop but no more gaming or anything needed for my laptop.

I am thinking of switching towards Macbooks so am kind of unclear whether if i should look at getting the new 13" retinas or get the current non retina one.

Ive also heard talks the next gen Intel (Haswell) could do quite well with retina screens since at this stage its only onboard graphics for retinas and non retinas.

so ive got 4 options that i can currently come up with1) get current 13" retina2) get current 13" non retina till 3rd gen comes out3) wait for 2nd get 13" retina ie. get a cheapie ($600ish laptop) till then4) clean/reformat my current laptop and install windows 8 and hope it'll last 6 months5) other options??

If you're very budget concious and you're just a "typical user" (i.e. mostly just web browsing stuff & editing documents who wants a very easy to maintain system) then I highly recommend checking out the latest Chromebook announced recently. Only US$250! (although a bit more to ship it here of course)

It will be the easiest laptop to maintain you've ever had, it is an incredible piece of hardware for its price. The Cortex-A15 it uses is the same processor as used in the Nexus 10 which blows the socks off anything else in the mobile world.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/30/3576560/arm-cortex-a57-cortex-a53-cpu-core "We're just barely seeing the first powerful ARM Cortex-A15 processors in bleeding edge devices like the new Samsung Chromebook and Google's upcoming Nexus 10 tablet, but the race for higher power and higher efficiency goes on. "

Yup, the latest Chromebook even gets described as "bleeding edge". True!

Only downside is you say you do a bit of Photoshop, but even that I expect to not be a problem in your specific situation as what I've seen of photo editing web apps these days is very impressive!

Who I am: multi time Ironman finisher, University of Auckland graduate, Freelancer (mainly focused on website development, message me for work).